ITALO VALENTI

ITALO VALENTI

FORMS

TEMPORARY EXHIBITION
19th FEBRUARY – 30th APRIL 2017

In collaboration with Archivio Valenti

At

Gipsoteca Gianluigi Giudici
Central Park, first floor
Riva Antonio Caccia 1a
6900 LUGANO

Wednesday to Saturday, from 10 to 18
Open on Sunday: 19th February – 5th March – 2nd April – 30th April, 10-18

Free entry

THE EXHIBITION

“Forms” is the title of the temporary exhibition devoted to the painter Italo Valenti, which will take place at the Gipsoteca Gianluigi Giudici from 19th February to 30th April 2017. Curated by Artrust, an art company based in Melano (Ticino), the exhibition will present to the public a selection of around forty works by the artist, which one part belongs to Artrust’s collection and the others significant loan are supplemented from the Archivio Italo Valenti.

«The “forms” by Italo Valenti moved us for their elegance and simplicity, for their poetic charge and their lightness, which occupy the space on the canvas, almost as not to feel the influence of gravity. This temporary exhibition at the Gipsoteca Giiudici in Lugano, wants to present to the public some career phases of this great artist: from train series, to the equally well-known moons, as well as the more gestural period, up to the collages and lyrical abstract works that Valenti took up precisely during his stay in Ticino.»

Patrizia Cattaneo, Director of Artrust

THE ARTIST

Italo Valenti (1912-1995)

Milanese by birth, he spent his formative years in Venice and Milan. He enriches his artistic background with journeys to Paris and Belgium to discover Cézanne and Impressionist as well as Post-Impressionist paintings. He adhered, together with important artists and intellectuals, to the movement Corrente, characterized by civil and social commitment by expressionist art to overcome the rhetoric of Italian art. In the years of the movement, the distinctive feature of his figurative painting – already stretched to the stylization of the figure in the direction of abstract art – lies in a kind of dreamy lyricism populated by persons of great primitivism as the sorcerers, the series of kites, the moons, the theaters, the stations and the boats. Valenti moved to Ticino, in Ascona, coming into contact with Jean Arp, Ben Nicholson, Remo Rossi and Julius Bissier; the association with this group of artists leads to a gradual rethinking of his painting in the direction of research on color and spatial effects that led him to a phase of “informal lyrical abstraction”. His subjects float in space of the canvas and break up in triangles, trapezius, and rhombus, primordial and enigmatic symbols: thus, abstract collages are being created in his last artistic production.